In Memoriam

I met Marion in Yugoslavia in 1990. She was on holiday with her boyfriend of seven years and we hit it off. We exchanged addresses and over the years we wrote letters and phoned and we even met up a couple of times. She had one massive problem though: she was a big girl. And when I say big, I mean big. Big as in 'I am having trouble walking for more than five minutes' big. It meant she couldn't go out to work, that she would be teased and pestered (even by her relatives) and her life was quite constricted. However, she always wrote nice long letters with everything that happened to her and her boyfriend and everybody else in her aquaintance.

Today my dad phoned me. My mum had received a phone call from Marion's boyfriend Ernst and I immediately knew: she had passed away. I phoned him back the minute I got off the phone with my dad and I learned she had indeed passed away.

She had been in hospital since the beginning of December last year. She had had surgery to remove some of the fat that was hindering her most. Of the 176kg (27st 10lb or 388 pounds) she weighed, she lost 50 (7st 12lb or 110 pounds). By March however she was still in Intensive Care due to her own body poisoning her and they had to amputate a leg. According to her boyfriend she just couldn't deal with it anymore emotionally. In the end she died peacefully on Easter Sunday. She was only 45.

Rest peacefully Marion.

You've got mail

To be returned eventually to the writer/family of...

As I live in a smallish apartment now, and several boxes of stuff are still lingering downstairs in the garage without being used, I felt some culling was needed. Like the box of letters.

I love letter writing and receiving and have done so since the early 1980's. At first it was just my cousin and I who were firm correspondents. Then a couple of school friends were added as I moved away to another town. And by the late 1980's, I had friends from Austria, Belgium, France, Morocco and South Africa. Some of them I had met in real life, others were through one of those pen pal agencies through school.

These will eventually be scrapped

When I started working abroad, I met new people and with some of those I also struck up a letter friendship, most notably Marion from Germany. She was a diligent writer, telling me about her family and her friends and her life in general, which was eventually mostly indoors as she was morbidly obese. Out of all the friends, she stuck around, others fell by the way side in dribs and drabs, never to be heard of again. 

Then came the emails and the smart phones and letter writing was changed forever. Why bother getting pen and paper when a quick email will do just as well. But where I kept the letters, I never kept any emails! 

I say I kept the letters, and I had. From 1983 every letter I ever received I kept. And took with me to whatever new home I would move into. Be it in Norway or Northern Ireland. But enough is enough. So, on Friday I grabbed the box containing the letters and took it upstairs. Determined to sort those letters out. Of course there were letters there I wanted to keep. The ones from Marion for example and the ones from my cousins and family (siblings, parents, grandmothers). But the rest? 

The top letter was from South Africa. He had a very distinct handwriting.

Old school friends, pen pals from South Africa and Austria, Japan and France: they all ended up in the laundry basket for recycling. I had to take out several letters, just to see who they were from, as I didn't always recognise the handwriting. 

There were some surprises though: Brazil and Egypt. I didn't know anybody there, so they probably sent me one letter, I sent one back and that was the end of that. An old school friend lived in Australia and New Zealand for a while. I had a pen pal in Japan. Old work friends from Italy and France who happened to be in Switzerland or Spain. And of course the Netherlands. So many from the Netherlands. 

I took off all the stamps, bound to make somebody happy with them and if not: can always be thrown out. But some of the stamps I kept. From every country I got letters from! I then stuck them on a piece of paper and the plan is to get it framed. Just have to find a frame now in one of my other 'to cull' boxes. 

Oh, and just for a game: can you spot the five royals? Have you found Hachi? Did you see the two different teddies (Brom wants to know)? And can anybody tell me who Olivia and Frederick are?

PS: the address shown on the last photo is an address I lived at over 20 years ago! No point in sending me mail there, but if you want my current address to send me a letter or a card...